Social Service in South Wales
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Social Service in South Wales 1937-1938 THE FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SOUTH WALES AND MONMOUTHSHIRE COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SERVICE SOCIAL SERVICE IN SOUTH WALES Fourth Annual Report OF The South Wales and Monmouthshire Council of Social Service 1937-38 THE SOUTH WALES AND MONMOUTHSHIRE COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SERVICE Affiliated with the National Council of Social Service. Patron : HIS MAJESTY THE KING. President: The Rt. Rev. The LORD BISHOP OF LLANDAFF. Chairman : L. TWISTON DAVIES, O.B E., D.L., F.S.A. Hon Treasurer : J. LL. MORGAN. Finance and General Purposes Committee : The President. Major Edgar Jones, o.b.e., m.a. The Chairman. Mrs. Mansel Lewis. The Hon. Treasurer. Sir Ewen J. Maclean, m.d., d.l. Hon. J. H. Bruce, d.l. Principal J. F. Rees, m.a. Aid. W. Jenkin James, o.b.e., m.a. J. Saddler. R. R. Sir William Jenkins, m.p. Williams, o.b.e., m.a. Assessors District Commissioner for the Capt. Geoffrey Crawshay, d.l. Special Areas. J. Owain Evans, c.b.e. Ministry of Health. C. Bryner Jones, c.b.e. Ministry of Agriculture. R. Pierce Jones, o.b.e. .. Ministry of Labour. Sir Percy E. Watkins, ll.d. National Council of Social Service. Board of Education. W. J. Williams, m.a., c.i. A. G. Prys Jones, m.a., h.m.i. Secretary : ELFAN REES, m.a. Headquarters : 2, Cathedral Road, Cardiff. Telephone : Cardiff 905-6. PREFACE in the first nine months of the THE most remarkable, and the mostyearremarkedunder reviewuponhashappeningbeen the hopefulin Southimprove¬Wales ment in trade and employment. Improvements in the coal and steel industries and in shipping, and also the successful efforts of the Commissioner for Special Areas in introducing some new industries, combined to give work where none seemed likely a year ago and to give hope where hope had died. The achievement, for achievement it was, richly deserved the publicity and recognition it received and, had this Report been written in December, 1937, rather than April, 1938, the Council could have subscribed to the general view that South Wales had at last turned the corner of trade depression. Unfortunately, however, the last three months have failed lamentably to fulfil the promise of the previous nine, and a recession which commenced in January and has continued since has gravely worsened the unemployment situation in South Wales. While it is unfair to assume the permanence of this set-back, it is equally unfair to ignore it, and the Council is compelled to emphasise that the present unemployment situation in South Wales is not one in which crisis no longer exists and from which men can turn with relieved consciences. At best it is a situation in which the abnormal and the " meanwhile " have receded only sufficiently to leave more clearly defined a series of long term problems to which the only approach would seem to be by way of equally long term policies. There are still today, in March, 1938, 160,524 unemployed persons in Wales, and the unemployment percentage for the Principality is 24.4 per cent, as compared with an average for the whole country of 12.5 per cent. What is a matter of even greater con¬ cern is that, with as many as 39,916 men in the Principality recorded as out of work for more than a year, Wales has by far the largest proportion of long unemployed. Thousands of them have been without work for over five years and the recent trade improvement has only served to emphasise their isolation from employment. Here, clearly defined, is a special problem in that there are thousands of men, especially in the age groups 45-65, who are called unemployed, and who are served, both statutorily and voluntarily, by machinery whose very design presumes their return to employment and yet, in point of fact, they are men for whom work again on ordinary commercial terms is a very remote possibility. The earlier improvement in employment has raised, too, into a prominence which wholesale unemployment has denied it, but should not be allowed to do so again, the problems of the employed man. He is finding to his bewilderment that his long looked for work is no panacea for all his ills. The difference between wages in many industries and average unemployment allowances is not as great as the difference in the demands a community makes upon its employed and unemployed members. Free school meals for his children, cobbling facilities at his Centre, reduced fees for his 5 Institute and Trade Union, the talisman of his card at the Cinema or Football match: these bare essentials of public sympathy, which help a little in the rigours of unemploy¬ ment, are not available to the man in work. The object now not of sympathy but of congratulations, the recipient no longer of concessions but of demands, he has to take his place in the community bearing his share of its burdens, repair the depredations of unemployment in his own home, pay fares to his work that often amount to 4/- each week, find the extra food and clothing a man at work needs. He has to do all this a and live life in which he is presumed to be better off. While his leisure hours are fewer, his very work creates in him a need for recreation which is not easily satisfied from his own resources. So we face, and indeed belong to, a community that has to rebuild, not its old institutions and habits and standards of living, but something new ; something which must take into account its suffering and its poverty and its comparative lack of youth and of leadership, its thousands who have ceased to exist as competitors in the labour market more and its thousands who, even in work, exist on a lamentably low standard of life. And as we face it we must ensure that a too ready and, at present, unjustified assumption of improvement is not allowed to obscure the volume of need that remains. 6 \ SOCIAL SERVICE 1. It is a most unfortunate consequence of the happenings of recent years that in South Wales the term Social Service has come to be defined in as narrow a way as " something to do with the unemployed " and that the Council itself is regarded by many as a body concerned exclusively with a special, and not always approved, form of welfare work amongst unemployed persons. When it is remembered that the main cause of the Council's establishment in 1934 was widespread unemployment and that its main supports have been public sympathy evoked by, and public funds confined to, either unemployed persons or the Special Areas, it is not difficult to see how this conception has grown up. It was perhaps wise that in these early years the Council did not stop to define, but concentrated on the work to its hand for which financial assistance was available. The time has now come, however, when a need is clearly indicated not only for a correction of the current misconception of the function of the Council, but for a clear and positive definition of its aims and purpose. 2. Social Service has a special and traditional place of its own in the life of South Wales and it is an odd comment on the current conception of it that some of the leaders of Social Service would repudiate all connection with the suspect thing. The administration of local government and petty justice, the management and maintenance of hospitals and district nursing associations, the voluntary service of one's community in hundreds of ways, is Social Service, and who will deny that, in many different guises, it is of the essence of life in South Wales ? Social service is enterprise which proceeds from a concern for human needs and human disabilities and any action which, out of a welter of bad housing and poverty, unemployment and bad employment, inadequate provision of recreational and cultural facilities, seeks to create " a green and pleasant land " is its task and its definition. It begins where statutory provision stops short and it seeks, by example and experiment in meeting unrecognised social needs, to tweak the conscience of the State and gain, for that particular need, both recognition and provision. It recognises too that deficiencies in statutory provision are almost balanced by ignorance of, or inability to use, existing provision and it seeks, therefore, to ensure a wider and fuller use of such provision as already exists for human well being. This is Social Service— the mouthpiece of inarticulate social needs, the pioneer in their experimental provision and the propagandist of provision already made. It will be clear from a definition which makes such high claims that Social Service will always be a much bigger thing than any Council which bears that name can comprehend. But, while this admission is necessary, it should be said with equal emphasis that in this wide field of endeavour lie at once the basis and the aims of the Council itself. 3. Three events have coincided to make this restatement and readjustment necessary at this time. In the first place unemployment, while remaining the major problem, was for a time reduced to an extent that revealed the existence and the neglect of other more general problems. Secondly, the National Council of Social Service has decided, following on the retirement of Sir Percy Watkins, to close its Cardiff office and lay upon the South Wales and Monmouthshire Council of Social Service the burden and challenge in South Wales of the work with which it is concerned.